When he climbed out, he realized he was down to his last change of clothes. He shaved and put them on. He walked out to the kitchen and found some eggs. He fried a couple and made toast and coffee. He was just sitting down when he heard a moan. He looked up and saw Lana standing in the door. She was frowning and holding her head.
“Headache?” he asked, trying not to sound too cheerful.
“Yes, it feels like it’s bouncing along underneath a semi truck.”
“Oh, that’s bad. Would you like some-”
“Don’t say it!” she said. “I just want some coffee. Is it good?”
“I don’t know, my mouth tastes like it’s full of stale ashes. Nothing really tastes good to me.”
“I’m sorry, you get used to it.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” he said. She frowned so he added, “As good as your cooking is, I don’t want anything to keep me from tasting it.”
She sat down after filling a cup, looking slightly more cheerful after his compliment.
“I’m really not that great. I only make a handful of things really well. The chefs in my class were outstanding. They could cook things that you wouldn’t believe. I was always just average.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true, the story of my life,” she said as she took a sip of the coffee. “Oh, that is good. The president gets all the good stuff, it isn’t fair.”
Daniel smiled and took a bite of his toast, it was dry and scratchy and he wished it would scrape away the aftertaste the cigar had left—it didn’t.
“Why don’t you tell me about it,” he said, “your life story?”
“It’s too boring,” she said, her eyes flashing a little with fear, as if she had much to hide.
“I doubt that, you’ve already introduced me to new foods, new pastimes. I know you lived in New York for a while, that must have been pretty interesting.”
She took a deep breath and then plunged into the strangest story Daniel had ever heard.
“I was born not far from here. My dad was a mover and shaker on the Beltway. I didn’t see him much, but he was a good provider. When I was sixteen, my dad decided to start a new family with his young assistant. My mother fell into the bottle and I was pretty much on my own. I had two older sisters, but they were both off in college and too busy to care about what was happening to me. I started staying out later and later, skipping school—you know, the normal acting out behaviors. One night we were partying near the train tracks. My friends dared me to go hobo on the train, you know, jump onto one of the empty cars. I had a few beers in me and so I did it. Only I fell asleep inside the car. It was going so slow when it passed us, but when I woke up it was going so fast. I didn’t know where I was but I thought, surely the train will stop soon and I’ll call my mother. Only the train didn’t stop and it didn’t slow down. I thought about jumping a few times, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. When it finally stopped the next day, it was in a giant train yard somewhere near St. Louis. I didn’t have any money, and no cell phone. I was just sort of lost.
“I know it sounds crazy, but for the first time I felt really free. No one knew where I was, and no one there knew me. They didn’t know about my alcoholic mother or that my father had deserted us. This was my chance to start something brand new, something that was just for me. So I decided to go for it. The only thing I had of value was the Rolex watch my dad had given to me. I pawned it and got some money, but it wasn’t enough to rent a decent place. Plus no one will rent you an apartment without a job and some sort of identification. I didn’t even have a driver’s license. It didn’t take me long to decide that this wasn’t the way to start my ‘new life,’ so I decided to call my mom. She was furious with me. I had just disappeared, she said, with no thought or concern for her. As far as she was concerned, I could just stay wherever I was. I didn’t know what to do. I called my father, but of course he wasn’t answering his phone. I hadn’t been eating, and hadn’t slept well in days, so I got some food and sat and cried all over my French fries.”
“Why didn’t you call your friends?” Daniel asked. “Surely you could have stayed with one of them.”
“My friends were not the come–to-the-rescue type. Besides, we were all looking for ways out of our crappy homes. I knew I couldn’t stay with any of them. Later that afternoon, I finally pulled myself together and found a hotel that rented rooms by the week. It took half of my money, but I got a place to stay and managed to sleep a little. The next day I got up early and got a newspaper. I was old enough to get a job, and if I could land one, my plan was to work and get my GED so that I could get on with my life and find a decent place to live. I was on the bad side of East St. Louis, not the kind of place you want to be all alone in. But I landed a job at a fast food place that gave me a uniform and discount food. I absolutely hated it, taking orders and listening to people complain. Plus the pay was ridiculous and I was working all the time. After a month or so I realized that I was stuck in a vicious cycle. It took all my money to pay my rent and feed myself. I had to find a job, but I wasn’t old enough or qualified for any kind of work. I learned pretty quick how fortunate I had had it at home. I called and begged my mother to let me come home, but she wouldn’t hear of it. My dad wouldn’t even return my calls. Then lightning struck and everything changed.
“I went out with some friends to celebrate my seventeenth birthday. We ended up at the riverboat casinos. I was too young to enter the gaming floor, but a wink and a smile gets you a long way in those places. Somehow, I ended up with a stack of chips at a blackjack table and even though I had never really played much, I found myself winning. At the same table was an older man, he had thick gray hair and a nice smile. He watched me win, it was small potatoes really, but my twenty dollars turned into two hundred and fifty. I had no problem walking away while I was ahead, even though my friends were begging me to keep playing. I knew I had been lucky, so I quit. I actually had to leave the girls I came with, they were so hooked. They had lost their whole paychecks and were now at the ATM’s getting more money. I went out to the bar and had a Shirley Temple, they do check for I.D. in the bars. Anyway, I was sitting alone and waiting for my friends to come dragging out of the gaming floor completely broke, when the guy from the blackjack table came up to me.
“‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked me. I told him thanks, but no thanks, thinking he was hitting on me, but before I could finish my usual line to losers who wasted their time propositioning me, he interrupted. ‘No, I’m not trying to date you, but I might be interested in offering you a job.’ I was so curious that I let him sit down. He asked how old I was and I told him the truth. He asked about my family and school, and I ended up telling him the whole story; there was just something about him that was safe. I can’t really explain it any better than that. Anyway, he told me his name was John Hamilton and he was a gambler. He toured all over the U.S. gambling and he was looking for a personal assistant. I should have been suspicious but John had the warmest, most gentle look in his eye. So I asked what a ‘gambler’s assistant’ did, and he said that he needed someone to help him identify the professionals like himself and the amateurs. He explained that in high-stakes games, most of the people playing are either people like himself, with a knack for the mathematics and structure of the game, or people with money to blow who liked the excitement. He said he would teach me to identify people, and provide room and board, plus a percentage of whatever he won.
“My first thought was no way, this guy was surely a con-artist; he had basically admitted as much in saying he needed me to help him gamble. I said it sounded kind of like cheating and he assured me that it wasn’t. He said he would never take advantage of me and, again, the look in his eyes said that he was telling the truth. But the fact was I couldn’t get ahead with the way things were going for me. I had two hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket; that was the most I had seen after paying my bills since I was living with my mother. So I agreed. He said he
was planning on being in St. Louis another couple of weeks, and that we could use that time as sort of a trial period to see how things went. He offered to put me up in the hotel near the river; it wasn’t a five star resort, but compared to the dump I had been living in it was paradise. He gave me cab fare to get my stuff and that night I moved into the hotel.
“Over the next few days we walked through the casinos. We would find an empty spot at the end of a row of slot machines that had a view of the game tables. Then he taught me to look for the signs of excitement or nervousness that a person usually displays below the table. He was a master at knowing the tells just by watching people. He could watch the player’s body posture, their facial expressions and hand movements, but anything below the table was out of sight. My job was to watch for those types of tells: a bouncing knee, fidgeting, foot tapping. Most of the high stakes players had learned that what happened below the table was out of sight, so while they were learning to master their tells above the table, they were still prone to give themselves away beneath it. It was simple work. I brought John a drink every half hour, mostly soda water, but sometimes a mixed drink. I made sure the drink was on the corner of a napkin, and the opposite corner would be pointing at a person that was giving away the fact that they weren’t a professional.”
She set her coffee cup onto a square napkin to show me what she meant.
“It was easy and fun. John knew who to take risks with and who not to push too hard. I spent most of my time playing nickel slots and pretending to be his daughter, a role which came easily since he was a better father than I had ever known. He paid for everything: my room, my meals, he even bought me clothes. He made a lot of money gambling, and paid me well. And that was my life. For three years we traveled from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, through all the little riverboat casinos and Indian Reservation Bingo Parlors. Wherever there was poker to be played, we were there.
“Then John got sick. It was cancer, and the doctors said it was too late to do anything more than stretch his life a few more months. All this time, every week or two as we traveled, John drove us in an old Mercedes that he loved. I was twenty years old now, and we had never been anywhere but resorts and casinos, but now John asked me to drive him home. He had a little place in Colorado, a lovely log cabin, very rustic with rough hewn wood furniture and a large rock fireplace. We stayed there and I nursed him. At first I merely fixed meals and ran errands; that’s when I first realized my love for cooking. I began to hunt for exotic recipes and gourmet foods, the kind that John loved to eat in all the fancy places we had visited. But it wasn’t long until he was too sick to enjoy anything. When he finally passed away, he left everything to me, the cabin, the Mercedes, a large bank account, but I felt like an orphan.
“Suddenly I had nothing to do, no future. I had enough money to live on, but I couldn’t just waste away in the cabin for the rest of my life. John hadn’t taught me to gamble, and I really didn’t want to go back to the casinos without him. So finally I sat down and asked myself, ‘Self, what do you really love to do?’ ‘Cook,’ I said without really thinking. Perhaps I would open my own restaurant, I had the money. So, I decided to go to culinary school, which required me to get my General Equivalency Diploma, which I did on my first try. Then I joined the CIA.”
Chapter 6
“CIA stands for the Culinary Institute of America,” Lana said. “I needed six months of hands on experience in a restaurant and a few letters of recommendation. So I got a job in a local restaurant and by my 21st birthday I was headed to New York. Culinary School was the only other place I really felt at home. There were two kinds of people there: one group was there just for the diploma, the other because they loved food and cooking and all that goes with it. The more I learned, the more I loved food, but it was hard work for me. I didn’t have the natural gifts that some of the other students had. Max, in particular, could do things with food that were simply amazing. He was even more talented than the master chefs that taught us.
“I guess I loved that about him, he was so talented, yet humble. He knew without a shadow of a doubt what he wanted in life. To be a chef in a great restaurant, the kind of place that was known for works of art coming from the kitchen each night. I had never really had a boyfriend. In school I was just too awkward. My years with John were rich and full, and while I met boys, even dated boys, they were usually on vacation; the places we met were full of temporary people. With Max, I felt alive like never before. He made the future seem so bright, so full of possibilities, as if nothing could ever darken our days again. When we graduated, I thought we would open a restaurant together, get married, have children, but then things changed. I financed his dream, and when tough times hit, he couldn’t handle the situation anymore. He left and I sold the restaurant.
“I didn’t know what do, so I came home. My mother was sick from years of drinking. My father had retired and moved to Florida. I spent months taking care of my mom and feeling sorry for myself. I had just decided to move back to Colorado when the virus hit. My mom died, and I couldn’t get a hold of my sisters or father. I wasn’t sure what to do when…”
She trailed off, not completing the thought. Daniel’s food was lying cold on the plate. He hadn’t noticed that he had stopped eating, but he was so engrossed in Lana’s story that nothing else seemed important.
“That’s amazing,” he said. He was about to say more when the lights began to flicker.
“What’s going on?” Lana asked.
“I don’t know, maybe the power’s going out.”
They moved to look out the big window in the dining room, but in the bright morning sunlight no lights were visible.
“Why would the power go off?” Lana asked.
“I’m not sure, but there hasn’t been anyone at the electric company, perhaps they have automated shutdowns in case of emergency or something.”
The lights flickered for another moment, then they came back on as they had been before.
“Maybe it was just a false alarm,” Lana said. She sounded as if she hoped that Daniel would assure her that everything was okay.
“I’m sure there are generators here,” he said. “That’s our first priority, to find out what else is down in the basement.”
“You haven’t searched it all already?”
“No, I only got as far as the security center. It’s really amazing, you have to see it.”
“I really would like to clean up first. Do you think there are more clothes where you found these?”
“Let’s go find out,” Daniel said.
If living in the White House wasn't invading the public trust, snooping through the president's personal bedroom had to be. When he had come in before, he had been a little awed, but that time he was looking for a specific item. This time, Daniel, along with Lana, was unashamedly going through drawers, closets, and the personal effects they found. It was an obvious place to look. Nothing had been out of place in the Oval Office, but that was just a room for show, a place for the president to exert his considerable influence. If there was any information on what the strange, alien spheres were, it made sense that it would be found here. It crossed Daniel's mind that a room downstairs, in the basement where he had found the security room, would be the logical place for storing secret information, but Lana needed clothes, so they might as well start their search here.
The president's master bedroom was normal in most ways, but the strange doors that seemed to be cut directly into the wall took some getting used to. The bed was a large California King; when Daniel sat on it, he thought it was strangely uncomfortable. There was a massive, leather padded headboard attached to the wall above the bed. On each side, there were night stands with drawers, which Daniel was pilfering through. There was a lot of personal correspondence, letters which people had written begging for answers about the spheres. A large leather book with gilded pages was the president's personal journal. Daniel's heart beat faster as he thumbed through the pages of handwritten not
es. When he reached the entry for the day the sphere had appeared, his breath caught in his throat.
May 18,
Today was the defining moment of my presidency. History will record that alien spacecraft were seen over the major cities of seven continents. The questions of who sent the spheres and where they came from are overshadowed by the aerosol they released. What won't be reported is that the gas was analyzed and determined to be some sort of chemical preservative, like salt, only in a gas form and extremely concentrated. What does that mean? I can't help but believe O'Hurn and his cronies at the Pentagon know more than they are letting on. Either the spheres are a weapon that was never in the intelligence reports, or truly alien, as in outer space. I never thought I'd agree with the conspiracy theorists, but those spheres moved at amazing speeds. Brittany is scared and so are the girls. Duncan and the Secret Service are pushing to move us into the bunkers downstairs, but if that spray is toxic then hiding in a hole won't help us. I must find out what is going on, nothing else matters, not after this.
The next page read:
May 19,
No one is talking, but they know something at the Pentagon. I've agreed to move into the bunkers downstairs, but it’s too late. People are dying, and Brittany isn't feeling well. I've been such a fool. My whole career I've supported cutting federal funding, especially for N.A.S.A. and military technology; now we are being exterminated, like termites. The only thing positive in this whole ordeal is that the spheres released their gas all over the world, everyone's affected. So it must be alien, how crazy does that sound? There's no report of people living in elevation being less effected, but there is hope that in thinner air, the aerosol might be less potent. I've ordered all intelligence sent to our secure location in the Rockies, but at this point we'll just have to wait and see if anyone is still taking orders.
The New World Page 5